Andrew Cohen: The theme of this issue is community and what we could call the utopian ideal. Obviously, it’s something we’re both interested in and have a lot of experience with.

Ken Wilber: Yes, that’s true. But as you know, even though I have a fair amount of experience with Integral Institute, and we’re trying to start local Integral Life Practice groups and so on, that’s never been my primary function. My job has primarily been to come up with the theoretical framework. I’m the pandit. You, on the other hand, are the guru, and in addition to doing theoretical work, you are down there in the trenches working to transform people’s karmas. And you do that in a community. You have to—that’s where it’s done. So I don’t mind talking about my somewhat limited experience on the practical side, and of course I have a whole lot of theoretical things to say about it.

Relationship and the Postmodern Predicament

Cohen: The whole issue of relationship and relatedness is a very big deal for those of us in postmodern Western culture. You and I have spoken about this a great deal in the past—how those of us at the leading edge are individuals whose capacity for individuation, for developing ego in the positive sense of what that means, is historically unparalleled. Our highly developed capacity for individuation enables us to objectify our experience to an extraordinary degree, to see ourselves and our own experience in a very big context. There have never been so many human beings alive who have had such a developed capacity to do this. But at the same time, the downside of it is that we’ve become so attached to this separate sense of self, this very capacity for individuation, that it seems to have made it harder and harder for us to sustain our relationships.

Wilber: Yes. And, of course, we have both heard of boomeritis. At the same time, there is a leading edge, and that is what we are going to particularly focus on.

Cohen: And a big part of the postmodern predicament, for so many people, is that we find ourselves very sophisticated, very evolved and developed, but very much alone and experiencing a deep emotional, psychological, and spiritual sense of alienation. We all long for deeper connections, but we are unwilling to give up our attachment to our self-importance in order to be able to experience that connection. One extreme example of this is in Holland, where they have the most liberal society in the entire world. It’s fairly common and socially accepted for couples to have this funny thing called an “alone-together relationship,” which means, “We’re in a relationship, but we live separately so we can each have our own space.” The idea is to hold on, at all costs, to one’s own space, personal freedom, and autonomy. I’ve spent a lot of time in that crazy country and most people are really unhappy.

Wilber: So I’ve heard.

Cohen: It seems that as we’ve evolved and developed, this truly miraculous capacity for individuation has really put us in a very difficult predicament. And so a big part of the evolutionary impulse right now is calling us, compelling us to find a way to connect, not only with our own deepest sense of self but also with other people at a deeper level. I think it’s very difficult to even think about spiritual development today without speaking about how it relates to this desperate urge to connect with others.

Wilber: Right. Relationship seems to be more important than ever and yet more elusive than ever. That’s the real irony of the postmodern situation, that the thing that is probably valued most highly, which is relatedness—everything is contextual, everything is relational—is the thing that people have the least of in any authentic sort of way.

Cohen: Yes. That’s part of the irony and the tragedy of the time we’re living in.

Wilber: The postmoderns or so-called cultural creatives have made community and what they call “heart” sort of their god. And that is a step up from modernity, but it’s still problematic.

Cohen: Well, it was a step up, but because it’s the highly individuated ego’s “heart” they’re talking about, it’s now preventing things from moving forward. I see it as being a kind of arrested development.

Wilber: [Laughs] Well, yes. Because they’ve gotten stuck there, arrested development is a good a way to look at it, technically. In some cases, they’ve also gotten just flat out dysfunctional and even pathological. The thing about the postmoderns is that, as we’ve often discussed, they’re at the stage of development that we call the green altitude or the pluralistic structure, or what Jane Loevinger calls individualistic, or Clare Graves calls relativistic. And this green or multicultural wave of development, which has pretty much defined the postmodern era, puts relationship and contextuality above all other values. But, as you indicated, it has also opened itself up to what we would call red-altitude impulses, which are not just highly individualistic and autonomous but self-centric, egocentric. All of these egocentric red impulses snuck into and have now flooded into postmodern culture and the postmodern experience, expressed as “Nobody tells me what to do.” And this leads to what I often call boomeritis, where you have basically this green/red, pluralistic/egocentric mentality. And so, on the one hand, there’s the ideal of this multicultural, multidimensional relational being—but “only as long as it doesn’t interfere with me and my desires.” And so all of a sudden, we’ve got exactly what you’re talking about in Holland: “Okay, we are going to be together, but only if it doesn’t impinge upon our egos.”

Cohen: Exactly.

Wilber: And then what’s so important in the whole boomeritis or what I also call “pluralitis” game is you have to give it a high-sounding name! You take this frankly somewhat dysfunctional and even pathological thing and you relabel it. So it gets called “empowering” or “finding your own space” or “being true to your own self.”  But in many, many cases, it’s nothing but the ego dressed up and gone to town in postmodern drag.

Cohen: Right. Which makes the problem just get worse.

Wilber: Much worse.

Cohen: Because if the individual hasn’t found a higher and deeper part of themselves, whether through relationships with other people or through the experience of a higher or deeper state of consciousness, there really is no way out.

Wilber: There’s no way out because the cure is actually mistaken for the disease. And so they say “no ranking, no judging, no hierarchies.” All of those things, which are actually the way you grow out of this mess, are condemned as the cause of the mess. And that’s a death spiral.

Cohen: Exactly. The discovery of hierarchy and the inherently hierarchical nature of the evolutionary process is what helps us to begin to see this overblown, overexaggerated sense of self in context—to see what’s come before and what lies ahead—and to realize that not only am I not the center of the universe, but I’m also part of a process that is infinitely greater than I’ll ever be. I’m a small part of it, and also I have a lot of development to do. [Laughs]

Wilber: Well, yes. That’s the pandit’s approach—that’s where you can step back, you can see, you can get a framework. I think an integral framework is one of the best ones out there, but almost any kind of developmental framework will help you stand back and get a little bit of perspective on yourself. That’s kind of the theoria side of the street. But then on the other side, there’s the guru’s approach, which is the praxis, the experience of states of consciousness that take you beyond your ego, literally. They don’t relabel your ego, which is what so many spiritual practices do, unfortunately, but they actually put demands on your ego—demands to make transcendental judgments leading to a truly expansive nondual evolutionary awareness. And that’s a state experience, a very real, not merely theoretical experience. So there are two cures for the postmodern predicament. One is on the relative side, the theoria or pandit side: It’s understanding the integral framework, and it has holarchies* and so on. And on the absolute side, the nondual side, the guru side, is a direct, immediate noncognitive higher-state experience. And guess what? Both of those approaches are condemned.

Cohen: Yes, because they both represent that which is higher than the highly individuated ego. That’s certainly what the guru represents, if he or she is the real thing.

Wilber: Yeah. Both of those authentic forms are condemned as the cause of the postmodern lack of relationship when actually they’re part of the cure. It’s locked us into a death spiral where the cure is called the cause of the disease, and the actual cause of the disease is embraced as the cure. And that makes it so very hard to get a handle on this.

Cohen: Because the ego is in the driver’s seat and it’s masquerading as wanting to actually spiritually evolve, as long as it is in control.

Wilber: That’s the key—as long as it is in control. And that’s the inherent bug in the whole game that goes with this pluralistic level of development. Pluralistic means “Nobody tells me what to do.” And right there, you’ve got the problem. It is so very difficult to help people see a way out once they’ve really bought that initial set of premises. It takes reading eight or nine or twenty books and thinking it through deeply, and then hopefully having some profound nondual experiences that really get you beyond dualism and relativity and egocentricity.

Cohen: And also having some human examples of what it could maybe be like to be a little more evolved.

Wilber: All of those things, exactly.

Cohen: I often point out to people that for a lot of us, while the whole idea of evolution is something we believe in when it comes to cosmological evolution or biological evolution, when we talk about the evolution of consciousness, the evolution of the self, it’s often very hard for us to relate to. The very concept is threatening to our ego because it forces us to consider the possibility that perhaps another human being might be more evolved at the level of the soul than we are.

Wilber: Right. How dare you suggest such a thing?!

Cohen: The minute you say it, there’s this impersonal rage that arises. Speaking about the evolution of consciousness or the self at the deepest level brings out the boomeritis rage in the most extraordinary way. As long as you see evolution as something that’s occurring outside yourself, it’s okay. But the instant you believe in the evolution of consciousness, you have to accept hierarchy at the level of the self, at the level of the soul, and that backs narcissism right into a corner.

Wilber: Well, that’s the point. The great German idealists, and certainly Aurobindo, and virtually any really serious sophisticated enlightened sage today, East or West, have an understanding of evolutionary theory and don’t have any trouble seeing evolution as the manner and mode of God’s creation. But if a person doesn’t believe in holarchy or learning or the unfolding of higher, wider, deeper modes of being, then of course they don’t believe in evolution and the whole thing is just self-contradictory. This is what’s known as the performative contradiction at the heart of so much of postmodernism.

Cohen: Sure.

Wilber: There are some very, very important things in postmodernism: the emphasis on community; the emphasis on relationship; the move to post-formal, which is the recognition that other modes of cognition besides merely rational ones are important; and contextuality, the understanding that all knowledge has a form of interpretation. All of those are important, but they’re not the total story. They have to be woven into an even larger integral framework or they completely self-deconstruct, and that’s what has happened. And so the question we’re asking now is: How do we take those incredibly important truths and weave them all together into a coherent integral framework? It can be done, and better than it has been done so far.

The Utopian Impulse

Cohen: I think it’s interesting to begin to understand that the spiritual impulse is also an impulse toward higher relatedness, especially for individuals who are more developed. Initially, that impulse is felt as a desire to experience a deeper state, to be connected to life, to the deepest part of oneself, to wholeness. But then, as we begin to awaken to the deepest part of our self and that inherent wholeness, inherent fullness, we find that part and parcel of that spiritual impulse is a desire to connect and come together with other people in the context of the deeper wholeness that we’ve realized, that we’ve experienced, that we’ve awakened to. And I don’t really think it’s possible to separate one from the other; in other words, it’s not possible to separate the desire to experience higher states from the desire to meet and connect with other people at a deeper level. And that’s why, I think, when people begin to awaken spiritually, often they are drawn to form new relationships, because they want to connect in the context of something deeper that maybe they weren’t aware of or connected to before.

Wilber: I think so. I think that’s another way of describing, basically, what the four quadrants are [See diagram, p. 41], in essence: I and We and It, or self, culture/community, and nature/the objective world. And all of these go together. So in terms of this thing we call community, it’s not that there’s a separate self that somehow dropped to earth, parachuted to earth, and then wandered around till it smashed into some other separate self. It’s that self and other show up simultaneously and are, in fact, parts of the same thing. And the point I try to emphasize theoretically, and the point that you certainly emphasize in your practice, is that self and culture and nature go together. We have to liberate all three of them, or none at all.

Cohen: Yes, they’re all part of that one whole. So when one’s own self evolves, deepens, becomes more whole, then one naturally begins to seek for that same depth and wholeness in one’s relationships with others. As we awaken to higher states of consciousness, as we begin to see our own presence here in this unfolding process in a larger context, and especially as we awaken spiritually, there seems to be a utopian idealism that is an inherent part of the evolutionary impulse itself. It’s an urge toward greater wholeness, greater fullness, and even toward perfect relatedness. Of course, we can’t forget that some of the worst mistakes that have happened historically have been a result of this kind of idealism, but the drive toward utopia itself is part and parcel of the evolutionary impulse. I know I’ve felt that way from the very beginning of my teaching career, and obviously you are also driven or moved by a utopian impulse. I actually think that this impulse is part of the human experience at all levels, the minute we evolve beyond mere survival needs.

Wilber: Yes, I think that’s true.

Cohen: If you’re at a survival level, I guess utopia would just mean being able to have all the food and creature comforts that you can imagine. But beyond that level, there are many versions of it. For many of us today, an unenlightened version would be the American dream. Of course, it never usually works out once you get there, but what’s important to see is that once one has moved beyond mere survival, the utopian impulse is always there. It is part of what it’s like to be deeply in touch with life and the evolutionary impulse, and I think it has really always been part of what’s driving humanity forward. Of course, it’s led to a lot of wrong turns and enormous catastrophic consequences at times; nevertheless, it’s objectively important to realize that that’s part of what drives us in our best moments.

Wilber: Oh, exactly. And I can give a slight tweak to what you’re saying and tie it in with what I call the “Atman Project.” One of the things that I’ve tried to show is that, indeed, there is this drive toward perfection, or this drive toward something better, this intuition that there’s something fully whole that I can reach for that is better than anything that has gone before. In my book The Atman Project, I actually went back to the earliest stages of life and showed that you can see every stage of human development as a working out of the Atman Project: Human beings seek wholeness on the physical level because they intuit that they are infinite and eternal in a spiritual or absolute sense, but they apply it to a relative plane. They apply that intuition of perfect Atman [Universal Self] to the ego and try to make the ego into perfection.

Human beings, even according to the spiritual traditions, have at least two components to them: one is absolute and one is relative. And we intuit both. So the utopian impulse often comes from sentient beings intuiting their absolute nature—their Buddha nature, their Christ consciousness—and therefore wanting that ideal as a realization. Even the postmodernists do that. Community and relationship are really in a sense the Atman Project of the postmodernist. That’s where they sense something can be better. That’s where they sense their own deeper and higher ground. The best of them are goodhearted, genuine, moral, liberal-thinking people who want their political philosophy to stop prejudice and stop marginalization, because they think something utopian, something better can be brought into being. And so the Atman Project is that combination of a true intuition about an absolute, ultimate, great perfection, call it what you will—Godhead, Brahman, Tao, and so on—but applied to or through modes or bodies or memes or egos or cells that aren’t perfect.

Cohen: A very good example of that, which I often speak about, is what I call “the promise of perfection” that is inherent in the romantic and sexual impulse. For example, if you fall in love with somebody, if the sexual impulse is awakened and there’s a particular object of your desire, and then you fire it up with the romantic ideal, you become absolutely convinced, at least for a few hours, and maybe a few days or weeks, that you will find perfect happiness in the arms of that perfect other. That’s also a utopian impulse, an ecstatic reaching forth toward absolute perfection, fullness, and contentment. But of course, in that particular domain, it’s an illusion—a biologically and culturally programmed illusion.

Wilber: Absolutely. The Atman Project can latch on to any of the seven chakras. First, you try to achieve immortality, perfection, wholeness through the physical realm, the first chakra. And once you’ve tried everything in the physical realm and that doesn’t work, then you move up. If you can’t eat your way to God, maybe you’ll fuck your way to God, so you try the second chakra. That doesn’t work. Then you try power. Then you move up to the mental levels. Then you move up to soul. And finally, at the upper reaches, you stop seeking altogether. The authentic self, the evolutionary impulse, has exhausted all these relative planes that you have misapplied the intuition of perfection to. And now you are ready to simply awaken to that ever-present presence that is infinite and eternal and a great perfection.

Cohen: Well, in an evolutionary context, don’t you think that probably forever, or as long as this experiment in life, in creation, continues, there’s always going to be that kind of ecstatic reaching forward, reaching forth to manifest that utopian urge toward fullness, toward perfect relatedness, toward profound integral interrelatedness at all levels, which, when you’re awake, is simultaneously always already fulfilled and always just about to be? We could call it a kind of enlightened duality.

Wilber: That’s an excellent way to put it. There are very different types of enlightenment, but one of the really important ones is just that: It’s going from trying to seek enlightenment, where you are driven by a sense of deficiency, of valuelessness, of lack of fullness—to discovering that ever-present wholeness. Then there is that “enlightened duality,” where even though you’re aware of the great perfection, you are still driven, not out of a lack but out of an overflowing.

Cohen: Yes. And hopefully, as we as a species evolve into higher stages of development, that overflowing is what’s going to be driving more and more of us.

Wilber: Abraham Maslow, when he was looking at the hierarchy of human needs, found that there were two different kinds of needs and there was a huge jump between them. The needs that go up from physiological needs to safety needs to belonging to self-esteem to the beginning of self-actualization are all what he called D-needs or Deficiency needs, because they are driven by people feeling that they lack something. But then the highest needs are those of self-actualization and self-transcendence, and those needs are not driven by deficiency but by what he called B or Being values. They are driven out of a sense of fullness, not out of a sense of lack. And that’s exactly what we’re talking about.

Cohen: Exactly. That’s what I mean when I use the term “top-down” as opposed to “bottom-up” development, which we’ve discussed at different times. To me, top-down means that you have reached that point of overflowing. It means you have transcended your ego to such a significant degree that while you are still interested in evolution or constant development, you no longer see yourself as not having arrived or not being on the other side. This attainment is something that can’t be faked. The question always is, To what to degree is an individual authentically resting in the fullness of their already enlightened self? To reach that point of overflowing, at least fifty-one percent of whatever the self is must be abiding in that fullness, beyond ego. That doesn’t mean that there is not an awful lot more of the self that needs to be consumed by the fire of the spiritual impulse. But when I say top-down, what I mean, specifically, is that the unenlightened seeker has died. So then it’s a different kind of development or a different relationship to development. For example, if one has crossed that fifty-one percent threshold, it means one has to act like it. One can no longer behave like a hungry ghost—always seeking for fullness. It means the inherent fullness of one’s being has to be acted out in one’s personal conduct and also in one’s relationships with other people. One has to display, demonstrate, and actualize the fact that one has realized the inherent fullness of one’s ultimate nature.

Wilber: Right.

Cohen: And also one’s relationship to development, to ongoing and perpetual evolution, would begin to express a certain kind of maturity, consistency, and self-confidence. That’s what I mean by top-down. Because what I’m interested in is a unique kind of development that can happen between people, which can only occur when each and every one of the individuals involved has reached nothing less than that fifty-one percent point.

Wilber: As we’ve often discussed, one of the things that you are pioneering is a new form of intersubjective yoga. And in a sense, for intersubjective yoga to work—in order for the community to actually be a utopia in the positive sense, not the crazy, absolutistic, fundamentalist sense—everybody has to have reached that fifty-one percent point, which means they are being driven by overflowingness because fifty-one percent of the self is now full, and therefore is going to overflow. And that’s an entirely different motivation. It’s a motivation of superabundance and of overflowing top-down fullness, not a motivation of deficiency.

Creative Friction

Cohen: The way I envision utopia is all about a potential that emerges when a lot of the factors that we’ve been discussing come into play. A group of serious and dedicated individuals would come together, and there would have to be a significant number of them who have reached this top-down or fifty-one percent point of development so that they’re no longer seeking in that desperate way, but they’re fundamentally finders who are interested in higher development. They recognize the larger evolutionary context, the seemingly infinite developmental process that we’re all a part of. And because they have each transcended ego, at least to a significant degree, they are able to come together in a context of what I call natural hierarchy. Natural hierarchy means that the inherent hierarchical context of life at all levels is realized, and you admit and acknowledge the hierarchical differences that exist between individuals at different levels. If we can come together in a context with other people where we can admit all this, see all this, without being threatened, and also have transcended our own egos to a significant degree, then a miraculous capacity for intersubjective creativity emerges. And that, to me, is when it gets really exciting. That’s the whole point. Because then individuals come together not merely in a state of harmony or lack of conflict, which is the green or pluralistic ideal of peace, but in a process that I call “creative friction.” To me, that is the definition of post-postmodern utopia, where, as you would say, we transcend and include our highly developed individuated self in a higher intersubjective process of engagement beyond ego. The living manifestation and expression of this creative friction that is experienced in an intersubjective context where hierarchy is recognized is the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen. That’s living ecstasy; that’s being one with the creative principle; that’s God manifesting on earth as, in, and through all of us.

Wilber: I’m right with you on that. I think one of the subjects that there is the most confusion about out there is the nature of the enlightened state, and the nature of ultimate reality itself. What we too often find is some pretty loopy version of “the ultimate state is just the One.” And there’s no understanding of the One and the many, or the many and the One, or the whole notion that nonduality doesn’t mean the absence of One or many but means neither One, nor many, nor both. It exceeds all of those, but it doesn’t mean they’re not present. I think earlier you called it “enlightened duality,” where there is still the absolute One and there are still the relative many, but now they are consciously in a dance. And that’s what’s interesting. It’s not that all of a sudden enlightenment means one hundred percent of the world becomes white light and everybody disappears.

Cohen: No way! But what’s important here, especially in terms of making this leap beyond the postmodern state of arrested development that we were speaking about earlier, is recognizing that the absence of conflict, in and of itself, is not higher wholeness.

Wilber: No, it’s death.

Cohen: And even authentic saints can unintentionally tend to give people the wrong idea about this.

Wilber: Yes, I know.

Cohen: The absence of conflict is not enough. Authentic friendship—where human beings are creative partners, lovers of life, God, and spirit—requires individuals to be able to come together and conflict with each other in the most creative way possible. It’s not necessarily going to be peaceful, but it will be ecstatic. It demands autonomy, a very highly developed capacity for autonomy and independence where you’re willing to embrace and dance and argue and fight in the most creative way with other people.

But in order for that to happen, the ego has to be transcended to a significant degree by both (or hopefully many) parties, so then we can come together and begin to rub up against each other in the most creative way possible. Then it wouldn’t be the ego that was creating the friction; it would be what we’ve often referred to as the authentic self, or the God impulse, that would be creating the friction itself. Now, for individuals who haven’t taken that leap that we were speaking about, beyond fifty-one percent, this would not be seen as very attractive. But to me, that ongoing creative friction is the definition of deep spiritual, psychological, and emotional health and vibrancy in a community or intersubjective context.

Wilber: Yes, I agree with all of that. If you look East and West, there are two fundamental notions of the God-realized person, the enlightened person, the awakened person, the person who is saved or liberated. One is some version of the saint, or the arhat—and that’s basically somebody who fundamentally is dead from the neck down. I don’t mean to be irreverent, but it’s certainly the notion that there is the absence of conflict. And there are not really even any positive qualities associated with such an individual, besides some very abstract virtues of universal compassion, or universal love, or universal wisdom and so on. The arhat, or the saint, is in touch with pure emptiness, pure perfection, pure nirvana—not samsara. There’s no form at all; it is gone.

The other version is the siddha. There was a big change, particularly with Nagarjuna in the East and Plotinus in the West, where it wasn’t just emptiness versus form, or the One away from the many; it was the realization that emptiness and form are not two, and because that’s the case, nirvana and samsara are not two. Now that’s an entirely different ballgame, because now there is this creative tension where there is a nirvanic component and a samsaric component in every moment of existence. And so what you are doing is balancing and harmonizing the infinite aspect of every moment with the finite aspect of every moment. That creative tension is what evolution is all about, and what fullness is all about. And the siddha is the one who plays with emptiness and form and is in touch with both of them.

Cohen: Right.

Wilber: And that’s a very, very different concept than dead from the neck down. The siddha is much more interesting, and the evolutionary siddha is really, I think, the only form of enlightenment that makes any sense at all. And it’s certainly the one that we have to embrace now: an integral evolutionary siddha. And they’re much more interesting characters.

Cohen: Yes. [Laughs] I agree wholeheartedly. And just to add to that, taking everything you said and then bringing it into the intersubjective context of relationship, the whole notion that being happy means there is no conflict is a very reductionistic way of looking at the meaning of happiness. For those integral evolutionary siddhas, happiness would mean that we are so much on the same page that we can really fight in the most creative way, in such a way that would challenge each of us, hopefully at the deepest level, the level of the soul, so that we could each ideally only evolve as a result. But of course it takes guts and it takes heart; it means you have to be willing to stay in the ring, so to speak. And if you’re not afraid, if you have crossed that fifty-one percent point, then you’ll experience that as an ecstatic engagement with life itself. You’ll experience it as ecstasy, not as conflict.

Wilber: Yes. There’s a metaphor I’ve always liked. We’ve all heard about the ocean and the waves. The ocean is supposed to represent the One, nirvana, the absolute, the ultimate, the infinite, and so on; the waves are samsara, the manifest, form, and so on. And in terms of these two different views of happiness, the question is: What do you do with the waves of life that are crashing ashore all the time? The arhat gets an iron and tries to iron out all the waves, in order to just have a nice flat calm ocean. The siddha gets a surfboard and rides the waves. It’s a corny metaphor, but it’s a very good one because a wave, after all, is a combination of the ocean and the wave; it’s the entire ocean expressing itself. And so instead of trying to get rid of that wave, you’re riding the evolutionary impulse. And surfing is exhilarating, even though it can also be painful and difficult and frightening. Surfers say it’s the most exhilarating thrill you can imagine.

Cohen: It’s the only thing there is to do.

Wilber: And that’s what being an integral evolutionary siddha, a self-realized authentic self, is all about.